Big, Engrossing Novels: A List and A Quest

I am often asked whether I’ve read anything good lately, and when I say, “Yes, there’s this great little book about the demise of print that I’ve been enjoying,” the asker always replies, “No, I want something good.” By which he means a novel that will take him places. It’s a desire that goes back to that time in childhood when we’re just discovering long fiction, just beginning to refuse to turn off the light and go to sleep, those years that turned us into lifelong readers. It’s an experience that gets increasingly difficult to recapture as we age, both because we read much faster than we used to, and because we take on novels of increasing complexity, like “Ulysses” or “Gravity’s Rainbow,” which are not, precisely, page-turners. By the time we finish college, or at least by the end of our twenties, we’ve read many of the standbys (“Moby-Dick,” “Anna Karenina,” “Bleak House,” “In Search of Lost Time,” “Middlemarch,” etc.), and taking leaps of faith on new big books becomes necessary. Perhaps every big book is a leap of faith: it can take a hundred pages or so for the story to pick up, or for the reader to acclimate to the writer’s language; and there are sometimes passages that lag, requiring confidence on the part of the reader that the writer knows what he’s doing—that despite the detours, he’ll bring the journey to a satisfying end. Ultimately, of course, this is part of what makes big, engrossing novels so engrossing. They’re not too tight, too perfect. They’re loose and shaggy, like the world, and like the world, you can get lost in them.

This week, I asked some of my fellow bloggers to share their favorite experiences with big, engrossing novels. Our selections appear below, and I hope you’ll share yours, too.